Proper diet plays an important role in maintaining individual's health. Specifically, beneficial dietary choices may reduce development of chronic diseases, weight gain, or other negative effects on a person while improving longevity and overall quality of life. Whereas, poor dietary choices typically have a counter-effect on an individual. The overall diet is determined by a series of individual selections, and thus, proper identification of high or better quality nutritional items is a prerequisite for a healthy diet.
Many food items currently sold in the United States are required to have a “Nutrition Facts” panel as mandated by the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (“NLEA”) and Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). These panels sometimes provide basic nutritional information and may categorize foods into a “food group” or “food groups.” However, such categorization can be imprecise, somewhat misleading or difficult to understand. Additional factors, including serving sizes, mixing with other non-nutritious components (e.g., water), may make it even more difficult to understand the actual nutritional value of a food item being consumed.
Some conventional nutritional systems relate to selection of individual items of food for specific nutritive values, and scoring the aggregate nutritive values of a series of food articles selected for an individual serving of a meal in order to provide an improved form of food-selecting-chart. These methods may generate a sheet on which articles of food are listed in relation to measurements of quantities of their nutrient ingredients in terms of a common rating factor. A common unit measure may be derived by dividing the established measure of the daily requirement per person of each of these items by three, the number of daily meals, and then dividing such quotients by some common arbitrary figure that is selected as representing the number of desired stages in a scoring scale. This provides a fractional scoring unit that is common to individual score scales for the various nutrients that are to be taken into account.
Other conventional methods include enabling individuals to select proper foods for improving health, controlling hunger and managing body weight based on calculations derived from a food's measured nutritional content. These methods involve assigning a ranking to food based on a combination of its calculated nutrient density and a predicted satiating effect. The nutrient density represents a selectively weighted overall nutrient density of the food and is calculated by a formula that yields a numerical rating or scale that proportionately rewards foods that have the highest amount of nutrients per calorie for nutrients that the FDA deems essential. The satiating effect predicts the satiation of a food on a numeric scale. A high effect value indicates that the food will be more satisfying per calorie. The two calculating factors or indices may then be represented and interpreted in an easy to use manner such as on a visual format.
Yet another conventional method involves an iterative algorithm for building a nutritionally balanced list of foods. The algorithm has the following steps: (a) creating an array of values indicating the level of deficiency/surplus in the current food list when compared to a selected standard; (b) comparing each food in a list of favorites to the deficiency/surplus profile, and generating a score for each food indicating the level of match; (c) using the scores to guide a user or algorithm in selecting a food to add to the list; and (d) repeating the above steps until the desired level of compliance is reached.
Other conventional methods also involve rating the nutritional quality of food. These methods include: (a) determining the water free weight percentage of one or more macronutrients in the food item; (b) assigning a numerical influence factor to each of the macronutrients; (c) multiplying the water free weight percentage of each macronutrient by the influence factor of the macronutrient to calculate a nutrient and influence factor product for each macronutrient; and (d) summing the nutrient and influence factor products of the macronutrients to calculate a numerical rating for the food item.
However, the conventional methods do not appear to take into account various assumptions, nutrient weightings, as well as, nutrient, vitamin and ingredient scores that are calculated based on the constituents of a particular food item. Thus, there is a need for a system and method for determining a nutritional health value or score of a food item that uses various inputs, including assumptions based on recommended daily intake (“RDI”) value(s) as well as nutrient weightings, to calculate a set of scores relating to nutrients, vitamins and ingredients in a particular food item, where such scores along with other variables are used in several formulas to determine the nutritional value of the food item.